Good Afternoon, again (You’ll understand why again later). I recently read a rave review about a new application on the Windows Live suite, Windows Live Writer, which had installed itself sneakily on my machine when I last updated Live Messenger. It’s not very often that you go to download a new piece of software and find it’s already on your computer, now that’s service!
Windows Live Writer is a blog integration tool that links itself to your blog, supporting all the major blogging platforms, including Wordpress (a-thank-you), allowing you to write blog posts with all the creature comforts of Microsoft Word, just as if you were writing a document before posting it online. Features from this include a spell-checker (good for me), standard text formatting tools and previews of how a post will look online before it’s published.
I thought the best way to test out the quality of the program is to write an actual blog post, indeed one reviewing the software itself, to my blog and see how it goes. If you look closely at this screenshot, you’ll notice that it’s content is different to this post, that’s because when I was tinkering with the settings (trying to get it to post to two blogs at once) it crashed on me. Lacking an autosave or recovery system, that meant that the post was lost forever. The software does come with options to save drafts as you go both locally and directly to the drafts area on your web server, but neither will save unless you elect to, so keep saving just as you would with any old document, even though Office comes with an autosave function.
As well as the normal old top menu buttons that Microsoft have been gradually phasing out with more recent versions of Office, the word processor facade is re-enforced by the text formatting tools giving everything you’d expect and/or need for a normal blog. It also comes with a few mission-specific buttons for starting/opening/saving new posts. The side menu, which oddly is on the right instead of left, as is normal for most WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, is half a view of recent posts, drafts and links to the blog, and half an insert menu, pre-loaded with all the normal things you would put on a blog post. Clicking “Add a plug-in” takes you to the Microsoft website, specifically a page about available plug-ins and extra functions that are free and, I’d expect, easy to install.
The bottom menu is more interesting, as it has all the admin stuff that I should (but don’t due to laziness) be putting on each post, including categories, tags and publish dates, which are easy to input and are attached to your post just as with a normal post. It also has tabs to see the post you’re working on in various views, edit, preview and source (which churns up your bog-standard HTML coding).
As a piece of kit I’m whelmed (not over or under). It’s a useful little tool, particularly if I can get it to post to both incarnations of my blog and save me having to do constant re-posts, but it’s nothing to write home about. It’s useful for saving me a bit of hassle and may become my main method for writing blog posts, but if I find another version of this application with even slightly better features, I’m jumping ship.
What it really needs is more layout functions. I’m able to do the standard stuff but inserting images with the software, as I have done above, doesn’t come out the same on the edit mode as it does in the preview, and may look different still when published. For example, if I moved an image around a block of text, it’d be interesting to see the text work around the image, like if I wanted a small image central in this paragraph and text all around it, rather than just the entire paragraph shifting around it, above or below.
Here’s an instructional video from Microsoft on using Writer:
My main reason for writing about this software is because of the impact it has on me and my writing. This is the first blog integration tool I’ve ever been persuaded to use and it has a lot of tools that will make my posts easier to deal with in the future. But the proof is in the pudding, so try it out for yourself and comment below.
In other words, I’m too lazy and have too much Uni work to do to properly finish this post off so I’m passing the buck. I plan to write a post in the next few days on Windows 7 when it’s released on Thursday. I’ve downloaded my free copy that I get for being a student from my university, but after the backlash that Microsoft got from early Vista adopters, I’m going to wait a bit and let MS work out the kinks and quickly throw out a few updates before I delve into the land of Windows 7 on my only fully functioning laptop, but I’ll still do an initial thoughts post and later a review.
Time to hit the books, unfortunately one of my text books is 800 pages so it hurts a bit to hit them…………bad joke I know.